Navigation auf uzh.ch
Navigation auf uzh.ch
The workshop proposal on "The typology of adposition and case marker borrowing", organised by Giorgio Iemmolo together with Eitan Grossman (Jerusalem), Petros Karatsareas (Cambridge/Cyprus) and Stéphane Polis (Liège) has been accepted for the next meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea in Split, to be held in September 2013.
Steve Moran, Johann-Mattis List and Jelena Prokić hold the presentation "Automatic Detection of Borrowings in Lexicostatistic Datasets: A Workflow for Automatic Linguistic Reconstruction" at the "Workshop on Quantitative Approaches to Areal Typology" (held conjointly with "KNAW Conference Patterns of Diversification and Contact: A Global Perspective") on December 14, 2012 in Amsterdam.
Giorgio Iemmolo will give an invited talk at the Linguistisches Kolloquium of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Konstanz on "Subject-verb non-agreement in Romance and beyond" on 6 December 2012.
Paul Sidwell (Australian National University) is giving a talk on "The Proto-Austroasiatic lexicon project: unlocking the missing millennia of Mainland Southeast Asia" in the Linguistisches Projektkolloquium. Time: Friday 7 December 2012 / 10:15 h Place: GLT-A-02, Gloriastrasse 12b, 8032 Zürich
Seppo Kittilä (University of Helsinki) is visiting our department and will give a talk on "Evidentiality in Finnish: two case studies" in the Linguistisches Projektkolloquium. Date: Friday, 30 November 2012 / 10:15 h Room: GLT-A-02, Gloriastrasse 12b
Balthasar Bickel has been invited to give two talks at the KNAW Conference on "Patterns of Diversification and Contact: a Global Perspective", to be held at the University of Amsterdam, 11 to 14 December 2012. On Tuesday, 11 December, he will give a talk in the general session on "The dynamics of areas and universals".And on Thursday, 13 December, he will talk on "Areal Diachronies"in the "Workshop on Quantitative Approaches to Areal Typology.
Frank Zimmerer(Universität Frankfurt) will present a talk at the Department of General Linguistics on "What massive reductions (do not) tell us". Monday, 3 December 2013. Place: Plattenstrasse 54, Room 204.
On December 1st Mathias Jenny will give a talk on "The far Nothwest of Southeast Asia - the languages of Myanmar"at the Workshop "Mainland Southeast Asian Languages: The State of the Art in 2012" in Leipzig.
Steve Moran presents a talk at the workshop on "Phylomemetic and phylogenetic approaches in the humanities". The talk is called "A Python Toolkit for Quantitative Tasks in Historical-Comparative Linguistics"and was co-authored with Johann-Mattis List from the University of Marburg. The workshop will take place at the University of Bern on Saturday, 24 November 2012.
Philippe Maurer will present a talk at the Linguistisches Projektkolloquium on "The extinct Portuguese based Creoles of Batavia and Tugu (Indonesia)". Time: Friday, 23 November 2012. Place: GLT-A-02, Gloriastrasse 12b
Giorgio Iemmolo will give a talk on "Dislocations with and without clitic in Old Sicilian"at the workshop on "Clitics in Old Italian". The workshop will be held at the University of Pavia on 23 November 2012.
Nikolaus Himmelmann (Universität Köln) will present two guest lectures. The first will take place as part of the Ringvorlesung "Sprache(n) verstehen"and ist titled "Wie die Sprachwissenschaft zur Empirie fand (und findet)". Time: Thursday, 15 November, 18:15. Place: Universität Zürich-Zentrum, Eingang Karl Schmid-Strasse 4, Hörsaal 180 The second is "On the universality of prosodic units"at the Linguistisches Projektkolloquium. Time: Friday, 16 November, 10:15. Place: GLT-A-02, Gloriastrasse 12b.
Balthasar Bickel is an invited speaker at the workshop on "Phylomemetic and phylogenetic approaches in the humanities". The workshop will be held at the University of Bern on Saturday, 24 November 2012.
As part of the lecture series "Sprache(n) verstehen", Balthasar Bickel will present a lecture on linguistic diversity with the title "Sprachliche Vielfalt: universale und regionale Muster". Time: 8 November 2012, 18:15-20:00. Place: Universität Zürich-Zentrum, Eingang Karl Schmid-Strasse 4, Hörsaal 180.
The SNF has awarded Giorgio Iemmolo an International Short Visit Grant for a stay at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel) in January-February 2013, where he will start a project on "The typology of adposition borrowing"with Dr. Eitan Grossman and will give talks at the Department of Linguistics and Department of Romance Languages.
On November 5 and 6, 2012, the Department of General Linguistics will be hosting a workshop on simulation models for language change, with participants from Nijmegen, Leiden, Munich, Tübingen and Zürich. For more information please contact Balthasar Bickelor Taras Zakharko.
We are pleased to announce that Dr. Steven Moran has joined the department as a postdoctoral researcher. Steve works on quantitative methods in historical linguistics, phonological typology and the Dogon languages of West Africa.
Mathias Jenny will present a paper on "Subject and subject marking" in colloquial Burmese at the 45th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics held at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, on 26-28 October 2012.
Mathias Jenny will present a Mon grammar sketch at the Austroasiatic workshop to be held at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore on October 25, 2012.
Adrian Leemann, Volker Dellwo and Marie-José Kolly present a paper and poster at Phonetik und Phonologie 8in Jena. Talk: "Rhythmic differences between read and spontaneous speech: the case of %V" Poster presentation: "Exploring speech temporal features of twins: the case of %V" Conference: Phonetik und Phonologie 8, Jena, 12-13 October 2012.
Fernando Zúñiga's research on Blackfoot is featured in the current issue of the UZH magazine.
Mathias Jenny will present a paper on "Form and meaning of clause linkage in Mon" at the conference Syntax of the World's Languages to be held in Dubrovnik, 1-4 October 2012.
Mathias Jenny is giving a talk on "Language contact and syntactic change in Austroasiatic languages” at the workshop Syntactic change and syntactic reconstruction: New perspectivesto be held at the University of Zürich. Date: 29 September 2012.
Balthasar Bickel, in co-authorship with Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, Taras Zakharko and Giorgio Iemmolo, is giving a keynote talk on diachronic universals of agreement systems at a workshop on agreement from a diachronic perspective in Marburg. Date: 5 October 2012)
Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, Giorgio Iemmolo, Taras Zakharko and Balthasar Bickel will present a paper on "The same but different: Formal discrepancies in determining the alignment of agreement systems"at the conference "Syntax of the World's Languages V" to be held in Dubrovnik, 1-4 October 2012.
Fernando Zúñiga will present a paper on "Algonquian relative root complements: a comparative perspective"at Syntax of the World's Languages to be held in Dubrovnik, 1-4 October 2012.
Tobias Weber will present a paper on "Agent marking splits conditioned by information structure: finding the relevant factors"at Syntax of the World's Languages V to be held in Dubrovnik, 1-4 October 2012.
Tobias Weber will present a paper at the workshop on "Syntactic change and syntactic reconstruction: New perspectives" at the University of Zürich. The title of his paper is "Indirect diachronic explanations in typology: the case of Differential Agent Marking". University of Zürich, 28 to 29 September 2012.
Robert Schikowski will hold a talk on "Modelling differential object marking in Nepali"at this year's SWL conference in Dubrovnik (1-4 October 2012). Co-authors are Balaram Prasain and Krishna Poudel.
The US National Science Foundation has awarded a new research grant on “AGGREGATION: Automatic Generation of Grammars for Endangered Languages from Glosses and Typological Information”to Emily Bender from the Univesity of Washington. The project will collaborate closely with Balthasar Bickel and others from the Chintang research team. Bickel is also a member of the Advisory Board of the project.
Volker Dellwo, Adrian Leemann and Marie-José Kolly will present a paper on "Speaker identification based on temporal information: A forensic phonetic study of speech rhythm and timing in the Zurich variety of Swiss German"at the 7. Tage der Schweizer Linguistikin Lugano. Conference details: 7. Tage der Schweizer Linguistik, 13.09.2012 - 14.09.2012, Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano
Adrian Leemann and Marie-José Kolly will present a paper on "Wissenschaftliches Potenzial der Smartphone-Applikation „Dialäkt Äpp“ für dialektologische Untersuchungen zur Schweizer Sprachlandschaft"at the 7. Tage der Schweizer Linguistikin Lugano. The paper has been co-authored with Iwar Werlen and Yves Scherrer. Conference details: 7. Tage der Schweizer Linguistik, 13.09.2012 - 14.09.2012, Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano
Marie-José Kolly and Volker Dellwo will present a paper on "L1-Rhythmus im fremdsprachlichen Akzent? Wie perzeptiv-phonetische Studien Fremdsprachendidaktik und Forensik bereichern können"at the 7. Tage der Schweizer Linguistikin Lugano. Conference details: 7. Tage der Schweizer Linguistik, 13.09.2012 - 14.09.2012, Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano
Adrian Leemann and Marie-José Kolly will present a paper on "Hören wir in Zürich bald Pfnüsu und Tubu statt Pfnüsel und Tubel? Das Fortschreiten der /l/-Vokalisierung in der deutschsprachigen Schweiz"at the 7. Tage der Schweizer Linguistikin Lugano. The paper has been co-authored with Sibylle Sutter, Dario Brander, Iwar Werlen, Fiona Hasler and Carina Eisenblatt. Conference details: 7. Tage der Schweizer Linguistik, 13.09.2012 - 14.09.2012, Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano
The General Linguistics Department at the University of Zurich invites applications for a postdoctoral researcher position. The field of specialization is in statistical approaches to areal/historical and/or corpus-based typology.
Sabine Stoll and Balthasar Bickel will present a paper on "How do children learn intentional gestures?"at the workshop Unpacking intentional communication in animals: an integrative approach. The paper was co-authored with Elena Lieven from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Date: 5-6 September, 2012 Location: Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 8057 Zürich
Taras Zakharko and Balthasar Bickel will present a paper on "Synchronic and diachronic biases in language families"at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea(SLE 2012), to be held in Stockholm between 29 August and 1 September 2012.
Tobias Weber will present a paper on "Voice alternations and grammatical relations: more on the variation of case alignment types"at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE 2012)to be held in Stockholm between 29 August and 1 September 2012.
Mathias Jenny will present a paper on Grammatical Relations in Monat the 45th SLE conference in Stockholmon August 30, 2012.
Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, Balthasar Bickel and Fernando Zúñiga will be convenors of the workshop "Grammatical Relations beyond Subjects and Objects: 40 Years Later" at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (29 August - 1 September 2012, Stockholm).
Giorgio Iemmolo will present a paper on "Symmetric and asymmetric alternations in direct object encoding"at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, to be held at the University of Stockholm, Sweden, 29 August - 1 September 2012.
Giorgio Iemmolo and Robert Schikowski will present a talk on "Differential argument marking and differential agreement"at the concluding conference of the ESF programme EuroBABEL. Conference date: 23-26 August 2012.
Fernando Zúñiga has accepted an offer from the University of Bern to take over the chair in general linguistics. Fernando will leave his temporary appointment in Zurich by the end of January 2013.
Two papers co-authored by Prof. Balthasar Bickel have recently been published.
Sabine Stoll and Balthasar Bickel have just contributed a chapter to the collection "Potentials of Language Documentation: Methods, Analyses, and Utilization". Their contribution is called "How to measure frequency? Different ways of counting ergatives in Chintang (Tibeto-Burman, Nepal) and their implications". The collection has been edited by Frank Seifart, Geoffrey Haig, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, Dagmar Jung, Anna Margetts and Paul Trilsbeek, and is available for download from the University of Hawai‘i Press (follow the link below).
The Zurich Centre for Linguistics, together with the Institute of Computational Linguistics and the Department of General Linguistics, are offering a small project to an advanced student who is interested in the interaction between computational linguistics and psycholinguistics.
Tobias Weber will present a paper on "Case alignment in Philippine-type languages: discovering diversity within and across languages"at this year's International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics (12ICAL) at Udayana University on Bali. Conference date: 2-6 July, 2012.
Tobias Weber will present a paper on "The rise and demise of non-canonical A marking in two-argument constructions"at the conference on Non-canonically case-marked subjects within and across languages and language families, to be held in Island between 4 and 8 June 2012.
Balthasar Bickel, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich and Taras Zakharko will present a paper on "Semantic role clustering: an empirical assessment of semantic role types"at the conference on Non-canonically case-marked subjects within and across languages and language families, to be held in Island between 4 and 8 June 2012.
Tobias Weber will present a paper with the title "Towards a family portrait of Austroasiatic: phonological characteristics"at the 22nd SEALS conference in France on Thursday 31 May 2012.
Mathias Jenny will present a paper on Differential Subject Marking in Burmeseat the 22nd SEALS conference in France on Thursday 31 May 2012.
Am Seminar für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft wird ab sofort bzw. zum nächstmöglichen Zeitpunkt 1 studentische Assistenz(zwischen 25-60%, ggf auch in unterschiedlichem Umfang in Semester und in den Semesterferien) angeboten.
Together with Andrej Filchenko (Tomsk), Balthasar Bickel was awarded a 3-year grant for a Major Documentation Project by the Endangered Languages Documentation Programmeof the Arcadia Foundation, UK. The project is entitled "Comprehensive Documentation and Analysis of Two Endangered Siberian Languages: legacy data and last speakers of Eastern Khanty and Southern Selkup"and will start on August 1, 2012.
Miriam Butt from the University of Konstanz will be a guest speaker at the Linguistisches Projektkolloquium. Her talk has the title "From spatial to subject marker". Time: Friday, 25 May, 10:15–12:00. Place: KOL-H-321, Rämistrasse 71.
John Payne from the University of Manchester is visiting the department. He will give a talk at the Linguistisches Projektkolloquium entitled "Towards a typology of noun phrase constituency". Time: Tuesday, 22 May, 10:15–12:00. Place: GLT-B-01, Gloriastrasse 12B.
The following paper by Giorgio Iemmolo together with Giorgio Francesco Arcodia (University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy) has been accepted for publication. Arcodia Giorgio & Giorgio Iemmolo "Differential object marking and identifiability of the referent: a study of Mandarin Chinese". To appear in a special issue of Linguistics on "Differential object marking: theoretical and empirical issues" guest-edited by Iemmolo Giorgio and Gerson Klumpp.
The department would like to congratulate Giorgio Iemmolo on receiving a postdoc grant from the Universiy of Zürich. He has been awarded the grant from the "Forschungskredit der Universität Zürich"for a project on "Case and agreement in comparison".
Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky (Universität Marburg) will give a talk on "Überlegungen zu einem neurobiologisch und sprachübergreifend plausiblen Modell des Sprachverstehens". Time: Friday, 4 May, 10:15–12:00. Place: KOL-H-321, Rämistrasse 71.
Balthasar Bickel, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, and Giorgio Iemmolo will give a talk on "Patterns of alignment in verb agreement"at the "Anna Siewierska Memorial Workshop", which will be held at the Department of Linguistics of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig on 27 April.
Johanna Nichols (Department of Slavic languages, University of California at Berkeley) will give a talk on "The paleogeolinguistics of some attractor states in morphological typology". Time: Thursday, 26 April 2012, 17:15-18:45. Place: SOD 1-105, Deutsches Seminar, Schönberggasse 9.
We are happy to announce that several members of the department were recently involved in succesful grant applications.
Sebastian Fedden will present a talk on "Pronominal indexing and alignment in the Alor-Pantar languages". Time: Friday, 30 March 2012, 10:15–12:00. Place: KOL-H-321, Rämistrasse 71.
Fernando Zúñiga has been invited to give a plenary lecture at this year's "Diskussionsforum Linguistik in Bayern". The Diskussionsforum takes place at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich from Monday 26 March to Tuesday 27 March.
Stefan Evert will give a talk on "Häufigkeit und Verteilung in der Korpuslinguistik". Time: Friday, 23 March 2012, 10:15–12:00. Place: KOL-H-321, Rämistrasse 71.
Sabine Stoll will give a talk on "Kognitive Universalien vs. formale Lernstrategien". This talk is part of the Linguistisches Forschungskolloquiumat the University of Zurich. Time: Thursday, 15 March 2012, 17:15–18:45 Place: SOD 1-105, Schönberggasse 9, 8001 Zürich
The following paper by Sabine Stoll and Balthasar Bickel has been accepted for publication: Stoll, S. & B. Bickel."How to measure frequency? Different ways of counting ergatives in Chintang (Tibeto-Burman, Nepal) and their implications." To appear in the proceedings of a conference on "Potentials of language documentation: methods, analyses, utilization.", ed. by Seifart, F., G. Haig, N. Himmelmann, D. Jung, A. Margetts, P. Trilsbeek, & P. Wittenburg, and to be published by the University of Hawai‘i Press, Manoa.
The following paper by Balthasar Bickel has been accepted for publication: Schiering, R., B. Bickel, & K. Hildebrandt."Stress-timed = word-based? Testing a hypothesis in Prosodic Typology." It will appear in one of the upcoming issues of the journal Language Typology and Universals.
Bruno Carton will give a talk on "Corpus-based Contrastive Analysis of Discourse Connectives: Methods and Findings". Time: Friday, 9 March 2012, 10:15–12:00. Place: KOL-H-321, Rämistrasse 71.
Rik van Gijn (Nijmegen) will present a lecture titled 'A sketch of Yurakaré (Bolivia)'as part of Fernando Zúñiga's lecture series on the Languages of South America. Time: Tuesday, 28 February, 10:15–12:00. Place: KOL E-18, Rämistrasse 71.
Rik van Gijn will give a talk on 'Comparative construction grammar: subordination strategies in South America'in the Graduiertenkolloquium Linguistik. Time: Thursday, 23 February 2012, 16:15–17:45. Place: ZUG-U-D31 (Seminarraum des Romanischen Seminars, Zürichbergstrasse).
Giorgio Iemmolo will present a paper entitled "Are dislocated direct objects clause-external? Evidence from Differential Object Marking systems"at the 38th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (University of Berkeley, CA: 11–12 Ferbruary, 2012).
Balthasar Bickel will present a lecture at the Linguistisches Kolloquiumof the Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität München.
Tobias Weber will give a talk at the Seventh International Conference of the Northeast Indian Linguistics Society(NEILS 7), to be held on 2-4 February in Guwahati, Assam, India. The title of his talk is "Some notes on phonological properties of the languages of Northeast India".
Mathias Jenny will give a talk at the Seventh International Conference of the Northeast Indian Linguistics Society(NEILS 7), to be held on 2-4 February in Guwahati, Assam, India. The title of his talk is "Northeast Indian - Southeast Asian connections: The case of 'give'".
Fernando Zúñiga starts his Swiss National Science Foundation Professorship (SNF-Förderungsprofessur). The associated research project is entitled "Islands in an ocean of (poly)synthesis and concatenative morphology. What linguistic theory and typology can learn from selected Amerindian languages".
Mathias Jenny has been promoted to the position of Reader (Oberassistent) as of 1 February 2012.
Giorgio Iemmolo will be defending his PhD thesis "Towards a typological study of differential object marking and differential object indexation"on 26th January. Place: Department of Linguistics, University of Pavia, Italy. Time: 26 January, 10am.
Sabine stoll takes part in the CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) project meeting of F-AG 3 Linguistische Feldforschung, Ethnologie, Sprachtypologiein Cologne.
Balthasar Bickel takes part in this year's Nijmegen Lectures as a discussant on 9 January, with Nicholas Evans (main lecturer), Michael Cysouw and Asifa Majid (co-discussants).
The department has submitted a complete reform of the BA and MA curricula, allowing for more flexibility for students and integrating new courses on methods. For more information please contact our director of studies Mathias Jenny.
